At this moment I am happy to announce that I have survived my last carnival in Bolivia (or so I think). Of all the traditions I’ve come accustomed to, carnival is probably my least favorite. Of all the MCCers, both Bolivians and foreigners, the only people I’ve been able to perceive that they truly enjoy this crazy time are twentyish year old North American boys, participating in MCCs one year program for young adults. What I saw the first year with a few mischievous boys was confirmed this year in Caleb, whose imgages I’m borrowing because I wasn’t up for the paint fight.
Since the great majority of Bolivian MCCers are part of the evangelical church and not the catholic church, this means they are expected to attend church camps designed especially for youth to avoid all that carnival entails. Unfortunately the mosquitos (this has been a particularly bad year for dengue fever) hour long lines for food and for the bathroom can discourage even the most pious of churchgoer.
The activities of carnival are varied depending on which part of the country and family customs. In Santa Cruz, events began Saturday afternoon with a big parade of comparsas, groups of people who have matching outfits (the most common in Santa Cruz is a disposable-like brightly colored robe). If you go out on Saturday afternoon or Sunday, you are likely to get hit with a waterballoon or a bucket of water. Monday turns a little dirtier with paints. In the meantime, there are block parties with lots and lots of dancing and drinking into the night. I predict most members of wealthy comparsas are drunk from Saturday afternoon through Tuesday night. Tuesday brings balloons the nastiest of things, including motor oil, urine, or dirty water fished out of the gutters., as well as drunk and angry people. I am told that in other cities, it is much less lawless than Santa Cruz.
Our first year we spent in the Baptist camp. The second we happily traveled out of Santa Cruz to the quaint town of Buena Vista, about an hour and a half north of the city. We had plans this year to go out to a farm of some friends, but the rains filled up the four places where we had to cross a river on the way, and so we stayed at home. We hid out for the most part, had a few meal exchanges with the nuns. We had another plan to go to another friend’s farm close by one morning to drink “ambrosia” which is made by milking the cow into a cup, squirting in some alcohol purely for sterilizing purposes (wink wink) and drinking it up in one gulp. I’ve never seen this process, but I’m told it’s just lovely. Unfortunately we couldn’t find affordable transportation to take us the 13km to the farm. In the end, this event turned into a churrasco (BBQ) at the persons’ local home. Apparently one of the four cows was giving birth and the calf’s head was too big, so, as they say here, we made her into meat. There was a strange mix of sadness and joy at the pile of meat cooking up on the coals. The festive drink, since we couldn’t have a cow to milk at our disposure, became sucumbe, which is made by boiling milk, cinnamon, sugar and vanilla, then adding a few raw eggs and beating the mixture until it foams, then serving it with grape alcohol (similar to pisco). The men of the party, who I’m told arrived drunk to the party, began telling terrible jokes and I began calculating how many rounds of sucumbe I would need in order to find them funny. Meanwhile the ladies would every once in awhile come along with a bucket of water and pour it over your head. I indulged in the pouring once, but I didn’t have a ton of satisfaction since no one ran away from me and there was no competition. Ultimately, I decided to sit there soberly and wait for the moment when I thought we could escape without being totally rude. Carnival is a bit of a mystery to me. Why do people like it? Why don’t I like it? I’m not sure if I’ll ever know for sure, but I found it very interesting what my drunk friend Walter told me, “ you have to take this moment to be happy, because who knows if you’re going to wake up tomorrow.” He went on to tell stories of young people in the neighborhood, dying suddenly for different reasons. The whole conccpt of carnaval is doing everything you like doing that God wouldn’t want you to, in order to repent on Ash Wednesday. Walter’s idea of a good time that God doesn’t approve of is getting sloshed and telling dirty jokes …what do I enjoy doing that God doesn’t want me to enjoy? Envying peoples’ care packages of dark chocolate, demanding cheap prices for clothing, reveling in my enemies’ downfall. It’s all so abstract and circumstantial I’m not sure how I’d fit it into three days of revelry. I don’t really have a good conclusion for all of this, but this quote from Thomas Merton kind of touches at a truth I think I´m looking for with these questions.

¨The basic and most fundamental problem of the spiritual life is this acceptance of our hidden and dark self, with which we tend to identify all the evil that is in us. We must learn by discernment to separate the evil growth of our actions from the good ground of the soul. And we must prepare that ground so that a new life can grow up from it within us, beyond our knowledge and beyond our conscious control. The sacred attitude is, then, one of reverence, awe and silence before the mystery that begins to take place within us when we become aware of our innermost self. In silence, hope, expectation, and unknowing, the man of faith abandons himself to the divine will: not as an arbitrary and magic power whose decrees must be spelled out from cryptic ciphers, but as to the stream of reality and life itself. The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.¨

Thomas Merton. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. William H. Shannon, editor (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003): 55.